There was a point that feels centered during the late 2010s, where indie music became nearly incapable of sincerity without focusing on or acknowledging how strange sincerity had become. Emotional gestures and motives wrapped in question marks as every stylistic decision seemed aware of its genre’s history, every record coming with a trailing footprint of a bibliography connected to it. Artists became more and more fluent in the language of reference and listeners, myself included, became increasingly fluent in categorization of genres. We reached for words like “hypnagogic pop,” “sophistipop,” or “post-internet,” each one useful enough to orient ourselves in conversation about sound without much explanation on why an album felt the way it did.
I feel like this is why Chanel Beads has remained so slippery as an artist. Shane Lavers’ project has been compared to almost every genre adjacent to dreamlike, emotionally and lyrically fractured indie music, but none of those descriptions online really land. You can definitely hear traces of artists as disparate as Arthur Russell, Burial, Alex G, Bon Iver, Dean Blunt, and even The Blue Nile. There are New Jack Swing melodies buried under these fractured ambient sonics, country pedal steel dissolving into clipping, prominent electronic percussion, church bells and choir samples sitting beside melodies that feel strangely nostalgic considering it’s a sound that hasn’t truly been explored before.
These influences aren’t the story:
In fact, one of the things that I admire about Chanel Beads is that his music rarely feels interested in hierarchy or history. Nothing is presented as higher or lower art. The same record is comfortable accommodating fragments of contemporary pop, experimental electronics, folk songwriting, and orchestral arrangements featuring incredible violin work without treating any of them as ironic quotation, existing together instead. What critics often dismiss as cultural waste feels less like discarded fragments here than the actual sound of modern awareness. The sonics and soundscapes Lavers’ creates on the album stress the idea that to become greater than the sum of your influences, you have to first embrace them as your own.
This is why Your Day Will Come feels so contemporary:
Many critics have described the album as existing in a perpetual now, and I understand the impulse. The songs bounce between what feel like dreams, conversations, memories, religious imagery, internet-age dystopia, and intimate confession without any feel for a chronological order. But I think what’s happening here is more uneasy than the structure of time already set. This isn’t an album suspended in the present, it’s somewhere right after it.
Every lyric feels like someone processing an experience right after it happens. The songs don’t feel like they remember events, they just start remembering them before they’re finished unfolding. Throughout the album, Lavers seems less interested in memory itself than in the unstable instant where experience starts to transform into memory. Consciousness has a slight delay, and this album follows that idea’s rhythm. That minute distinction transforms into one of the album’s defining lines.
“I thought I saw you smiling in all my memories.”
Most probably would, and from what I’ve seen have described this as a nostalgic lyric. I hear it more to be uncertainty. He doesn’t remember someone smiling, he thinks he saw them smiling – showing that the memory is already blurry and vague while it’s still being created. That emotional instability explains why reusing the title Your Day Will Come feels much more meaningful than anyone initially gave it credit for. Plenty of discourse across music forums I’m on joked that Your Day Will Come was “somehow” better than Your Day Will Come, and Spotify was just as unready to separate the two. But the repeated title slowly reveals itself as another expression of the album’s key theme as this new record expands the first record. The relationship reminds me less of a sequel as Genius describes it, but more of a theatrical adaptation, revisiting familiar emotions from a wider, more grand and symbiotic perspective.
In interviews, Lavers has mentioned theater as an influence, and once that idea enters your mind, the record reveals itself differently as a collection of emotional motifs.
Your Day Will Come opens with “Drums Only” which works like an overture, focusing on physical presence over introducing melodies. Lavers famously recorded much of the album with his speakers’ mere inches from his face so he could physically feel every kick drum, and that practice immediately defines the listening experience. The percussion and harmonies displace the comfortable air in the sonics. Before any lyrics, the record sets the standard that these songs should be experienced as sensations before you interpret writing.
The production follows this same logic:
Most have described Chanel Beads’ production as blurred, but I feel that “porous, ”meaning a boundary that is easy to cross, is the better word. Nothing on Your Day Will Come stays within its standard boundaries. Zachary Paul’s violin doesn’t stick out or contract the electronic production; it seeps into the soundscape until the distinction disappears fully. Processed vocals somehow become the album’s most intimate instrument. Percussion more so reshapes the space in each song rather than anchoring them. Acoustic and digital are seamlessly blended, no opposites in sight.
Even songwriting follows this porous logic:
Dreams become memories, memories become prayers, prayers become threats, confessions become jokes, love becomes grief before anyone has left. The emotion categories in place refuse to remain separate. That quality becomes immediately apparent on “Song for the Messenger,” which opens with the most startling line I’ve heard from Chanel Beads: “I should fuckin’ burn in Hell for what I said to you.” It’s an unusual opener because of how little it resembles the writing that follows. The confession starts with sharp clarity before immediately dissolving into descriptive imagery. Buildings, flowers, The Little Prince, corner stores, water, and slaughter, to name a few. The song progresses through guilt instead of a narrative. People rarely remember their worst moments chronologically. They remember flashes.
Water quickly becomes one of the album’s defining images, initially suggesting cleansing, “Lead me to the water.” Then redemption slowly becomes bound to punishment, “Save me from the slaughter,” and by the outro, the difference has fully collapsed, “Take me to the water, show me to the slaughter.” Although nothing materially changes, the speaker’s understanding does. Forgiveness and consequence share the same symbolic space for the listener.
Lavers’ vocal performance and inflections highlight this transformation and make it even more devastating. Throughout the album he rarely expresses anger in a conventional manner. His voice seems more so restrained, digitally blurred through plugins, giving this feeling of emotional delay. This blur and delay somehow don’t obscure Lavers’ vulnerability but reflects how it increasingly exists today: filtered through microphones, voice notes, texts, recordings, and screens. He uses this artificiality to raise sincerity, recognizing that genuine emotion today is rarely experienced without some form of mediation.
If “Song for the Messenger” explores guilt, then “The Coward Forgets His Nightmare” quietly breaks down another comfortable and conventional myth. “Thought the music would save you like it saved me,” later becoming “Thought the music would save you. I wished it saved me.” This line is an incredible reversal. Music remains meaningful but the belief in its ability to rescue anyone fades. Throughout the album, songs consistently gesture towards heavenly sounds with choir samples and harmonies before falling back to normal human production. Nothing miraculous happens as love doesn’t erase grief and art doesn’t rid suffering.
That persistence in the album is what moves the listener along:
One of the warmer sounds on the album comes with the song “JBL in the Fireplace.” Among references to tap to pay devices, credit scores, and newspapers, Lavers’ makes a simpler statement that stuck out to me. “Don’t let them put the shame on you.” On paper this should almost sound sentimental but in its delivery it landed more like a revelation. Part of that power comes from the album’s refusal to apologize for intensity and blunt seriousness. Contemporary indie music today seems terrified of direct emotional writing, preferring vagueness over vulnerability. Chanel Beads understands irony perfectly well, but Lavers’ never substitutes it for depth or meaning. Every scream, clipped vocal, and burst of laughter feels less like commentary and more like another quirk hanging off rather sincere songs.
The centerpiece of the album starts with “Tyler Richard” and flows through “Outside Your Life” and “Dust in the Wind,” the former being my favorite off the record, and latter being the most replayable for me, forming the emotional core of the record. “Tyler Richard” feels like a suspension in a dream, “Light bends different when I’m near you.” The line feels romantic before being threatened with LED headlights in the line after, “LEDs on the cars they want to crash into.” Violence appears here, disappears, then returns in a new form. Dreams become harder to find a difference from memories, as nothing seems certain.
“Outside Your Life” provides the closest thing Your Day Will Come has to emotional release. Deep bass swells push beneath bright orchestral moments while the percussion drives the momentum throughout the open space on most of this track, with only six lyrics filling nearly 5 minutes of space. Even though the song doesn’t resolve tension, it teaches itself how to carry it, which is the most closure we see throughout the record.
This is where I think Your Day Will Come stands out compared to many of its contemporaries in projects from Mk.gee or Nourished by Time, who are typically compared to Chanel Beads, that focus more on groove and resolution. Many note that this album has less memorable hooks than the one before, and I think they’re right. But, I think Lavers’ isn’t abandoning melody, he’s more so deferring it. The choruses come, just not when expected, disappearing before they satisfy. The songs feel highlighted in the buildup around hooks rather than hooks themselves, allowing melodies to linger like the bridge in “Opening in the Gate.” It’s one of the reasons the album reveals itself more on the second and third listen because emotional connections overwhelm you as you start listening, long before you begin feeling familiar with each track on repeated plays.
That slow revelation finishes beautifully with “Boss.”
For nearly the entire record, Lavers’ voice has remained suspended behind layers of autotune, delay, and processing, never fully opening itself to naked confession. Then for a brief moment on “Boss,” something changes. “I feel it slipping but I wanted you to stay.” His voice strains, almost as if the digital veil briefly falls off. It’s as though the album spent forty minutes teaching us how mediated modern emotion has become before allowing one last glimpse of what existed underneath. This effect is especially crushing because it’s been withheld for so long.
More than anything, Your Day Will Come feels like a quiet turning point for indie music. For much of the past decade, artists have hesitated between emotional directness and fragmented experimentation, seemingly treating them as mutually exclusive. Chanel Beads refuses that difference. Rather than stripping away digital instruments searching for authenticity, Lavers finds his own authenticity within it, allowing this processed soundscape to become a vessel for emotional expression. If much of the 2020s has been defined by artists learning how to make music after the internet, Your Day Will Come is one of the first records I’ve heard that no longer treats the internet as the subject. It’s simply in the atmosphere these songs reflect. In this, Chanel Beads gently sketches a path forward for indie music where sincerity and complexity can deepen each other’s impact on a listener.
Coming back this morning to my third listen through Your Day Will Come, I keep returning to something I couldn’t quite express yet. This isn’t an album haunted by the past or memory. It’s haunted by perception itself.
Every sound arrives falling into another, every lyric questions its own certainty. Every emotion seems aware that the moment it’s experienced, it will begin to falter. The record doesn’t imitate decayed mediums or sentimentalize obsolete technology, it’s imitating thought itself, that associative, fragmented feeling of consciousness, constantly changing what it believes the body just went through.
I feel like this is why Chanel Beads have become so hard to pin down to a category:
Genres tend to be described by sounds, but this album describes understanding. It asks what love feels like before we’ve decided what it means. What grief sounds like before it becomes a story. What memory looks like before nostalgia smooths and blurs its edges. The album never argues that music can save anyone. In one of its quietest moments, it almost reveals that it can’t. In lieu of that, it offers a smaller lesson that seems more valuable. That a song may not be an escape from uncertainty - but sometimes a song is proof that someone else lived through that uncertainty too.
